Britain’s Genocidal Starvation of the Irish and the Brave Resistance of Nationalist John Mitchel

A Celt will soon be as rare on the banks of the Shannon as the red man on the banks of Manhattan.” — London Times 1846 editorial

One of the greatest cover ups and frauds ever perpetrated is the true story of the Irish Starvation, or genocide. In hidden history, it’s more commonly referred to by the highly misleading “Irish Potato Famine.”

Basic research shows that the British sent an army into Ireland after a potato blight and aggressively removed enormous quantities of food stuffs from Ireland for use in England. Additionally, the potato blight was present in Europe at the time, which allowed “merchants” and speculators to profit from higher food prices there.

Accordingly, as food was removed, somewhere between 2 million and 6 million (Fogarty) Irish died and were buried in unconsecrated graves around the country. No one knows all the precise locations, as the cover-up artists ignored the mass burial sites scattered around Ireland. Some were dumped at sea. But the following map shows the mass graves of Ireland and the British occupational lock down. This was birddogged on-the-ground research and interviews with locals conducted by author Chris Fogarty.

The Irish Starvation represents two fundamental reasons for a strong nation rooted in blood and soil. Irish land had been looted and stolen from the Irish farmers by large British interests tied to international finance. In laissez faire capitalism, such as existed in the mid-19th century — and to a large extent globally today– food went to the highest bidder. Once tenant farmers were under the gun to feed their own families and kin, distressed sales of higher-value foods such as cattle occurred and fell into the hands of merchants.

Ireland’s diet since pre-history has been meat, dairy products, grains, fruit and vegetables; only later supplemented by potatoes. Central to its ancient legends are its livestock, reaping hooks, flails, querns and grain-kilns and -mills. The many Connacht grain-kilns and mills shown on the Irish Ordnance Survey Map of 1837-1841 operated continually prior to and during the Starvation, and subsequent to it until the 1940s. Therefore, the story of the potato blight as the cause of mass starvation is quite secondary.

According to the historian Cecil Woodham-Smith, foreign landlords regarded the land as simply a source of income, from which as much as possible was to be extracted. With the Irish “brooding over their discontent in sullen indignation” (in the words of the Earl of Clare), the countryside was largely viewed by landlords as a hostile place in which to live, and absentee ownership was common. Some landlords visited their property only once or twice in a lifetime, if ever. The rents from Ireland were generally remitted out of Ireland, resulting in a capital slash-and-burn stripping operation.

Indeed, it was England that was overdependent on potatoes, not Ireland. Ireland’s difficulty was that the Irish didn’t own their own land. They only produced off of it as tenants. As starvation threatened all of the British Isles, a Times of London editorial of Sept. 30, 1845, warned, “In England the two main meals of a working man’s day now consists of potatoes.”

England’s potato dependence was excessive and reckless. Grossly over-populated relative to its food supply, England faced famine unless it could import vast amounts of alternative food. But it didn’t grab merely Ireland’s surplus food, or enough Irish food to save England. It took more, for profit and to exterminate the people of Ireland.

Queen Victoria’s economist Nassau Senior gloated that existing policies “will not kill more than one million Irish in 1848, and that will scarcely be enough to do much good.”

When an eyewitness urged a stop to the genocide-in-progress, Treasury Chief Charles Trevelyan replied, “We must not complain of what we really want to obtain.” Trevelyan insisted that all reports of starvation were exaggerated, until 1847. By then, several million were dead. He then declared it ended and refused entry to the American food relief ship Sorciére.

While Trevelyan was lying through his pie hole, the Waterford Harbor British Army commissariat officer wrote to him on April 24, 1846: “The barges leave Clonmel once a week for this place, with the export supplies under convoy which, last Tuesday, consisted of two guns, 50 cavalry and 80 infantry escorting them on the banks of the Suir as far as Carrick.” While its people starved, the Clonmel district exported annually, along with its other farm produce, approximately 60,000 pigs in the form of cured pork.

Thomas Carlyle, an influential British essayist and supposed “enlightened” man, wrote, “Ireland is like a half-starved rat that crosses the path of an elephant. What must the elephant do? Squelch it — by heavens — squelch it.” And a Times headline on Sept. 2, 1846, and again in 1848, read “Total annihilation.”

Ireland starved because its food, from 40 to 70 shiploads per day, was removed at gunpoint by 12,000 British constables reinforced by the British militia, battleships, excise vessels, Coast Guard and by 200,000 British soldiers (100,000 at any given moment). Ultimately, Britain seized from Ireland’s producers tens of millions of livestock; tens of millions of tons of flour, grains, meat, poultry and dairy products; enough to sustain 18 million persons. This was similar to the operation these goons conducted in Bangladesh in 1943. Personally, this is hard to write, as I have over half English and Scots Ulster blood, although they got out of this predatory-parasite hellhole earlier.

Par for the course, the Public Records Office British regiments’ “Daily Activity Reports” of 1845 to 1850 have “gone missing.” Those records include each regiment’s cattle drives and grain-cart convoys it escorted at gunpoint from the Irish districts assigned to it. Also “missing” are the receipts issued by the British army commissariat officers in every Irish port tallying the cattle and tonnage of foodstuff removed, and likewise the export lading manifests.

The toll from conventional “historians” has been put at one million genocided during this period, but in reality it is much more. After being evicted and without shelter or food, the Irish tended to weaken and end up in poorhouses, where they died in droves. They were then disposed of in mass graves. This kept the dirty work somewhat out of public view. People just disappeared. The performance of the Catholic Church was spotty. In fact, few clergy died. Other starving Irish ended up in squalor and without assistance in hostile Liverpool. A contingent of perhaps a million with better resources managed to escape to America and elsewhere.

John Mitchel, an Irish Nationalist and Patriot, Stands Tall as a Man of Honor During the Irish Starvation

John Mitchel (1815-1875) was a Irish Protestant and nationalist. He was derided as Papist Mitchel for his championing of all Irish through his newspaper The United Irishman. He was also dismissed by TPTB as an exaggerating firebrand and traitor during this period.

Mitchel was a fierce critic of international finance capitalism, which he blamed for The Great Hunger. His Jail Journal is one of Irish nationalism’s most famous texts. He wrote in 1846, as the death toll mounted:

They behold their own wretched food melting in rottenness off the face of the earth, and they see heavy-laden ships, freighted with the yellow corn their own hands have sown and reaped, spreading all sail for England; they see it and with every grain of that corn goes a heavy curse.”

He openly criticized the so-called famine policy of the government and could see nothing in it but a machination, deliberately devised and skillfully worked, for the entire subjugation of the island — the slaughter of one portion of the people and the pauperization of the rest. This is standard New World Order-Shock Doctrine methodology still going on today.

He came to the conclusion that “the whole system ought to be met with resistance at every point, and the means for this would be extremely simple; namely, a combination among the people to obstruct and render impossible the transport and shipment of Irish provisions; to refuse all aid to its removal; to destroy the highways; to prevent everyone, by intimidation, from daring to bid for grain and cattle if brought to auction under ‘distress.’” Unfortunately, the Irish people were too weak and hungry to resist and the Church sat on its hands.

Using his newspaper as his pulpit, Mitchel called for resistance against British rule in Ireland through non-payment of rents and by preventing the export of food from the country. He became the most vocal in highlighting how the British, in his opinion, deliberately exasperated and mismanaged the starvation to reduce (aka genocide) the population (which the British Government considered to have a surplus).

Mitchel’s Excellent Nationalist Manifesto for Every Nation

Mitchel opposed alien ownership of Irish lands and declared that the Irish people had a distinct and indefeasible right to their country and to all the moral and material wealth and resources thereof, to possess, to govern the same, for their own use, maintenance, comfort and honor, as a distinct sovereign state; that it was within their power and their manifest duty to make good and exercise that right; that the life of one peasant was as precious as the life of one nobleman or gentleman; that the property of the farmers and laborers of Ireland was as sacred as the property of all the noblemen and gentlemen in Ireland, and also immeasurably more valuable.

For publishing his views about the British Empire’s crimes against his people, Mitchel was arrested in 1848 and his paper shuttered. He was then hauled before a star chamber and sentenced for sedition to 18 years of hard labor in Devil’s Island, Tasmania. In 1853, he managed to escape and went to America, where he supported the Confederacy. He returned home to Ireland for a few years before his death in 1875.

The following video is a great tribute song to Mitchel. It has shockingly few views, but I must say that it brought a tear to my eye.

This article originally appeared on The New Nationalist and was republished here with permission.

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Nick Dean

For accuracy’s sake, Carlyle was a Scotsman and Trevelyan Cornish, and the English every bit as much or as little ‘Celtic’ as the Irish, Scots, Welsh or Cornish. So the words English and Celt should not appear as they do in this article. What you’re really dealing with is, the parts of the British Isles Jews and their tools of finance and economy had already subjugated by similar means vs. the parts they hadn’t.

A distinction to add this discussion of the exploitive alien landlord system of Ireland was the comparison to Scotland which had the same system. But in Scotland’s case the rich landlord’s (lords) were not foreign but were related by blood and soil to their tenents. This bound them to treat their kin honorably and offer relief out of their personal wealth when famine threatened.